Application Performance Monitoring​

In today's digital economy, an app isn't just part of a business - in most cases it's a company's business. Therefore, performance issues create headaches for IT teams and significant obstacles to business growth and profitability.
Moreover, outside the organization, consumer expectations for application performance are changing. Nowadays, people want flawless digital experiences on demand, and any issues they are experiencing need to be solved in real time.

Fortunately, today's technology is evolving as fast as consumer expectations, especially in the area of application performance monitoring (APM). But understanding the breadth and depth of an APM solution can be a little difficult. Let's fix this with an overview of the key details of application performance monitoring and how it can help you optimize IT operations and grow your business.
Using application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, businesses can monitor whether their IT environment is meeting performance standards, identify errors and potential issues, and provide seamless user experiences by closely monitoring IT resources. The best APM solutions provide IT teams with the information they need to connect application performance to business results, as well as identify and fix performance issues before they affect the end user, and theoretically reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR). 

 

Application performance monitoring should not be confused with the related concept "application performance management" (also referred to as "APM"). The latter refers to the broader strategy of managing performance excellence, of which tracking is only part.

In addition to detecting issues, comprehensive APM solutions tell when and where users are affected in their journey and why the problem has arisen - for faster and more proactive resolution in the future. This is where APM provides tremendous value for IT teams.

 

The key to supporting the user journey is to understand the health of every business transaction happening in your app in real time. In short, end-to-end application performance monitoring works like this: By observing, alerting, and collecting data on the source of the problem (application, application dependencies or supporting infrastructure) if your applications are behaving normally, Data in the context of business impact Adapting your application environment to fix similar problems before they affect the business APM monitors and collects information about almost everything that plays a role in application availability.

But let's examine some of the most critical application performance monitoring metrics: 

 

CPU Usage

Server-level APM looks at CPU usage, memory requests, and disk read / write speeds to ensure that usage doesn't affect application performance.

 

Error Rates

At the software level, APM tracks how often application performance drops or fails. For example, when web requests end with an error or during memory-intensive operations, such as searching a database.

 

Response Times

Average Response Time is the metric that indicates whether speed is affecting application performance.

 

Sample Count 

For flexible, cloud-based applications, you need to know how many server or application instances you are running at any given time. APM solutions that support auto-scaling can cost-effectively scale your application to meet user demand.

 

Request Rates

This metric measures how much traffic your app is getting - spikes, inactivity, or concurrent users.

 

Application Availability / Uptime

This metric, which tracks whether your application is online and available, is the metric most organizations use to check compliance with SLAs.

 

Customer Satisfaction

Probably the most important metric is what users think of their experience. By correlating data in a single source of accuracy across monitoring silos, APM saves IT professionals a ton of manual time when searching through individual event logs or creating synthetic monitors.

 

Taner AKDEMİR

APM & Software Team Leader